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Special issue from the Environment Research Event (ERE) 2009
Edited by Craig Froome
Introduction
Sustainable water management includes two important concepts: sustainability and management of resources. The [11] Brundland Commission Report (1987) defined sustainability for human and environmental development as where the needs of the present generation are met without compromising the needs of future generations. This definition implies an equitable distribution of the resources not only spatially between users in a region, but temporally between them over time ([23] Harding, 1998). Management includes the allocation and use of the resources. Information is the key to good management. Understanding the demands of the stakeholders, as well as the possibilities and limitations of the resources, is essential for effective resource management ([18] EC (European Commission), 2000). In order to allocate water, managers are guided by conceptual, and numerical models that predict how much water will be available at various times throughout the catchment or groundwater basin ([42] Rivera, 2007). These models depend on good quality data and accurate conceptualisation of the various hydrological processes ([49] Royer, 2004). All these data can now be stored and visualised in interactive 3D geological models, which provide a better environment to process, analyse and communicate information rather than to conceptualize the hydrogeological system ([45] Ross et al. , 2004a).
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are powerful tools, which allow for spatial analyses and representations of georeferenced data ([58] Tweed et al. , 2007). These tools have proved their usefulness in hydrogeology over many years, but standard multi-layered systems of GIS are quite limited for modelling, visualizing, and editing subsurface data and geological objects and their attributes ([1] Abdul-Rahman and Pilouk, 2008). With general-purpose GIS, geological layers are represented as regular grids or triangulated surfaces that can only be modelled as explicit functions in the form of z = f (x,y ), where x and y are a pair of coordinates defining a location. Therefore, they cannot integrate all the constraints induced by 3D data sets ([35] Mallet, 1998; [50] Soller et al. , 1998). However, in recent years, geomodelling systems have been developed with powerful 3D visualization and property modelling capabilities for the construction and analysis of 3D geological objects in a way that general purpose GIS cannot do...